My DoItAll Review

Jack of all trades, master of none.

The DSi is on its way soon, shipping to stores here in the States in little over one more month -- and one of its most notable upgrades over the current hardware model is its many different non-game applications. Calculators, moving memo pads, an audio clip editor and more will all be available for digital download to the device, with more bite-sized productivity-promoting apps to come later on down the line.

Well, the TOMY Corporation must be hoping to either capitalize on the market of current DS owners who are reluctant to spend the full $170 to trade up to the newest system revision, or else the company is just trying to beat it out to market -- because My DoItAll is an all-in-one application collection that would seem to serve many of the very same purposes.

Productivity packages like this have hit the DS before, existing in a niche genre of titles that seek to expand the system's non-gaming abilities rather than offer anything with any real play value -- there have been personal journal cartridges like Diary Girl, and the infamous launch day chat program Ping Pals. But My DoItAll takes a different approach than those other efforts. It casts its net wide, instead of focusing on any single utility, and tries to appeal with its quantity of included gimmicks, rather than the quality of any single one.

Counting cards and calculations. Let the good times roll.

And there are, admittedly, a lot of them. My DoItAll certainly doesn't live up to its name, but it does include 15 or so different things like a calculator, a metronome and a periodic table. It has some slightly curious and briefly interesting features like a voice changer, which alters the playback of clips you record through the DS mic, and a customizable spinner, in case you lost the one that came packed in your Twister board game box or want to digitize your latest game of Spin the Bottle.

It also includes a few light card games like Crazy Eights and Ninety-Eight, reproduced here in a simple style not unlike Nintendo's Clubhouse Games. There's a dice roll simulator, useful if you've perhaps run short of physical dice since your latest D&D session. And there's polling app, which you can use to wirelessly submit questions to your friends for their answers, but only if they also have their own My DoItAll cartridge plugged in and turned on.

The whole batch is wrapped up with what is probably supposed to be the package's focal point -- a PDA-esque calendar application that lets you keep track of your personal schedule and plan out upcoming events. Fair enough. There's definitely some variety in what's on offer here.

The problems start to pile up pretty quickly after browsing through all the My DoItAll options, though. The first is that, while this selection of applications is fairly varied, it's also a pretty random and grab-bag mix. Including things like a calculator and calendar is an easy decision, but the periodic table? When's the last time you really had to look up the atomic weight of Ytterbium, anyway?

The second drawback is that the interface is pretty basic on a visual level -- My DoItAll allows you to create your own Mii-like personal avatar with a decently diverse set of options for hair color, accessories and the like, but that's ultimately pointless. The character is only occasionally used, and most often you'll get blank black faces filling in during applications (like the card games) where other players could have been present (but won't be, because you won't know anyone else who'll also own this cartridge).

And speaking of the card games, they reveal another graphical drawback -- poor use of screen real estate. If, for example, you have more than four cards in your hand while playing Crazy Eights, the extra cards beyond the forth will scroll off the screen. You'll have to touch an on-screen arrow icon to shift through your stack. How hard is it to display a hand of standard playing cards on the screen simultaneously?

Similar navigational oddities plague the rest of the apps, too, as you'll often have to scratch your head for a moment or two to determine what you're looking at and what you need to touch next with the stylus. It doesn't help that the basic, bland font and background stays the same for pretty much every included function.

Finally, beyond all of these issues is the biggest one of all -- price. This package has shipped to retail with an MSRP tag of $29.99, which is just way too high to actually consider for purchase of a cart like this. Consider that many of these same applications will be available to new DSi owners for free or just a couple of dollars apiece. Or further consider that iPhone owners could reproduce this full suite of options on their devices even more easily, with the added benefit of choice and variety. I bet I could launch the App Store and track down seven different downloadable takes on the periodic table in under a minute. All of them for free.

The Verdict

So TOMY's My DoItAll is certainly curious, and even a novel idea, but it ultimately falls well short of being a real, practical purchase. The audience who'd even want to use their DS systems for PDA-like purposes is probably the very same group who've already pre-ordered the DSi, which will render several of this package's applications obsolete in just over another month. And the inconsistent selection, boring visuals and navigational troubles bundled along with everything else in this grab-bag "game" make it not worth the while of those DS Lite gamers who don't plan on making the jump to the next piece of hardware too. So steer clear of My DoItAll. It tries to, but it doesn't.